Today in Digital Marketing - Turn and Face the Strange Ch-ch-ch-Changes

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, April 9th. Today, under pressure, TikTok is about to push out a new app as Instagram says, let's dance. The modern love between third-party platforms and APIs and life on Mars might seem easier than the space oddity we're seeing in Meta's ad auction these days. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, today in Digital Marketing. There are lots of metrics for digital advertising, and each platform has its own metrics, too. Take Google's ad strength number. That's a measure of how well Google thinks your ad is set up, mostly in terms of your creative. That's different, by the way, from quality score, which tries to give you an idea of how well your ad performs compared to other advertisers. But one question that keeps coming up for marketers makes up today's trivia question. Does ad strength affect your position in Google's ad auction?

Starting point is 00:01:05 The answer at the end of today's episode. YouTube is launching Shopping Collections, a new way for creators to curate products from their favorite brands. YouTube's example? For instance, they could pick a selection of products for any theme from your current everyday makeup look to the ultimate capsule wardrobe. Collections will appear in a creator's product list, store tab, and video description. These collections can be put together on the Studio mobile app, though the company says it will be coming to desktop soon. They're also launching a new affiliate hub in the YouTube app, so creators can find the latest list of shopping partners, competitive commission rates, promo codes, and even request samples from brands. Third, YouTube is expanding its bulk tagging for affiliate shopping creators.

Starting point is 00:01:50 That expansion sees the feature going to all shopping creators. And finally, they've added 4th Wall to their list of platforms that support content management. If you've been feeling like your ads on Meta's platform have been really volatile lately, you're not alone. Anecdotal reports are all over social media, with media buyers saying the last month has seen particularly strong swings. But what does the broad data tell us? For that, I'm joined by Yardin Shakad. Yardin is CEO of Verus. They anonymize and aggregate data from 6,000 e-commerce advertisers, so they've always got a great bird's eye view of the overall market. And Yarden, according to your

Starting point is 00:02:31 data, when did this volatility start? Starting on February 20th, there was a lot of volatility that we were starting to see, starting at CPMs and flowing through to ROAS. 40% of companies were what we call significantly affected, which means that they had a deterioration on a ROAS basis of 10% or more. And 13% of companies were very significantly affected, which is a deterioration of over 25% or more. And can we infer any patterns? Like, is this just for specific brands or company sizes or is meta moving the spend around? It's a lot about like spend shifting to weird places, like all the spend shifts to reels or all of a sudden you know all the spend is on ios versus android and things like that and it feels like there's something in the mechanism that got a little out of whack that that's what's going on uh and nothing to do with

Starting point is 00:03:42 like a specific uh company or thing. There was, you know, theory going around. It was Shopify. We disproved that. iOS, we also disproved that. It wasn't like, there wasn't any trend that happened to everyone from what we saw. Is this volatility dramatic enough

Starting point is 00:03:58 for us to consider pausing meta ads entirely? I mean, meta is still king. You know, even at that 10% deterioration, it's still worth it to spend most of your budget on meta. It's the only place that people are actually able to build a significant top of funnel and scale. We haven't seen spend deteriorate, even though some of the performance has deteriorated. So on a macro thing, it's definitely something to observe. It's something that happened. It's something to watch out on.

Starting point is 00:04:34 But my takeaway is actually like social media is overhyping this problem. And there's a lot of issues here, but it definitely has not become a channel that is unusable. Yarden Shaked is CEO of Veros. If you want to compare your ad data with others in the industry, you can sign up for a free Veros account at varos.com. That account will let you benchmark against specific categories, give you real-time market trend data, and a four-week data look back. In a rare peek behind the curtain, Meta has broken out Instagram's ad revenue, and it shows a hefty profit over the past few years. Normally, Meta groups its financial updates together, making it tricky to gauge each app's individual success.

Starting point is 00:05:23 But this year, as part of its latest legal filing to dismiss an antitrust case, they provided specifics. According to the documents, Instagram made $11.3 billion in 2018, $17.9 billion the next year, $22 billion in 2020, and $32 billion in 2021. The most recent numbers in the documentation catch up to the first half of 2022, which, when you extrapolate, is likely past $33 billion. Remember, Zuckerberg bought Instagram for $1 measly billion. Quoting social media today, quote, the data suggests that Instagram generated around 30% of Meta's total revenue in 2022, which if you were to extrapolate that into last year's number, would suggest that Instagram brought in around $40 billion in ad revenue in 2023, unquote. There are other legal things

Starting point is 00:06:20 happening, not to mention new European Union regulations that require platforms to disclose more. So this might not be the only revenue update we get. Threads may soon show up on more marketers' content calendars now that their API is starting to get into gear. It's in testing with a handful of third-party platforms for now, but so far, it's only been a publishing API. They only recently added the ability to see, reply to, or hide incoming comments, as well as pull some basic post data like engagement numbers. Now, we're getting more information on what's likely to be in the toolkit with the release of the official API documentation. Webhooks will soon let third-party tools get an immediate notification

Starting point is 00:07:06 when someone replies to a post. This engagement part is really one of the key missing pieces that's holding back a lot of brands from posting on Meta's competitor to X. A few other details emerged from the API documentation. Accounts will only be allowed to publish 250 posts from a third-party tool within a 24-hour period. Those are posts, not replies.

Starting point is 00:07:28 There is a 24-hour limitation to the number of replies, and that number is 1,000 replies. As for image formats, they're only taking JPEG or PNG through the API. Video uploads will be limited to five minutes, and text posts won't be able to exceed 500 characters. So far, there still aren't any ads on Threads, though you can bet that's high up on the list. So Threads wants to be the next Twitter, and TikTok wants to be the next Chex Notes Instagram. TikTok seems to be very close to releasing a new photo sharing app, which will be called TikTok Notes. Which to me is a really strange name for an app that does images and not, you know, notes. And some users are already being prompted to automatically share their photo posts on the forthcoming app.

Starting point is 00:08:22 This is, of course, super smart since it means the app will launch with a whole bunch of content. A surprising amount of TikTok content is indeed already just images in a carousel. TikTok would not confirm a launch date. Oh, and as for the trivia question, does your Google ad campaign's ad strength affect your placement in the ad auction at all? This has been the subject of some speculation on social media in the past few days or so. But Ginny Marvin, Google's ads liaison, this week weighed in with the answer. No, ad strength is not ever used in the auction. So even if you're not doing Google's content recommendations, and even if your ad strength is really low, it will not change whether your ads will serve.

Starting point is 00:09:13 So finally got into a proper video game. You know, I've been, I don't know, I've been trying to find a good game to kind of dive into, and I thought maybe I'll just do another run through of Fallout for the 12th time. But Diablo 4 actually came out on Game Pass and I'm not really one into the whole fantasy. All the fantasy scripts sound the same to me, you know, ah, the dark souls have entered the gem of the den of sin and you shall burn in the depths. You know, like all that stuff is just kind of, I don't know, it's in one ear and out the other. Even Skyrim was full of it, and I loved Skyrim. But anyway, Diablo turns out to be

Starting point is 00:09:47 kind of a fun game. Although I've done something, I think I've messed up my build, so I'm a rogue, and I've invested in a lot of traps in my build, and I can just melt mobs. I can go through like 50 skeletons in like literally three seconds. They're comically easy, in fact. But the bosses, like, what am I doing? Diablo players, what am I doing wrong here? Like the bosses are just demolishing me. And it just seems really unbalanced. And I don't understand. Maybe this is a thing with Diablo. I don't know. But we'll see. Anyway, I'm off to do that. Apparently, there's a clan I can join

Starting point is 00:10:23 of Mastodon users. So we'll see if I can find a nerdy clan to be with. All right, I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Turn and Face the Strange Ch-ch-ch-Changes

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